Prior art discusses various devices for processing containers/receptacles. A typical example for this is blow-molding containers. In this, a preform, following thermal treatment/preconditioning, is transferred into a blow mold in a blow-molding station, and is there molded to a container by the application of a blowing pressure. A plurality of wheel-like, star-like carrier wheels is typically used as subcarriers. The feed wheels deliver the thermally preconditioned preforms. The preforms are removed from a plurality of processing stations by the feed wheel. After blow molding, the molded containers are again removed by a removal wheel and passed on for further processing.
In such devices, however, the feeding and discharge wheels/stars require a relatively large amount of space. Furthermore, the design complexity for mounting and driving the rotors is significant. In addition, the problem occurs that the feed location and the removal location are stretched relatively far apart, so that a relatively large blind angle is created due to the use of the two wheels. In this region, practically no processing or production can occur. Accordingly, this blind angle limits the number of receiving options and thereby of the processing stations at such a device, so that its system output is reduced.
The system output correlates inter alia with the diameter of the processing wheel. Larger and therefore more expensive diameters are possibly resorted to in order to be able to provide time necessary for processing. With a larger diameter, the number of processing stations can at the same time possibly be increased. However, such a solution is usually very expensive. Therefore options are searched for with which the processing time is increased while the diameter is as small as possible. DE 103 25 693 A1 discusses a possibility to use only one star for feeding and discharging containers, where different grippers are divided into groups on the common rotor, approximately eight preform grippers and eight bottle grippers, where the grippers of the first group have different trajectories than grippers of the second group, where the trajectories of the respective group are complex.